Arte: Fast forward

Martin Creed's early works were minimal, low-key and made from everyday materials. As a major exhibition opens in Birmingham, Nicholas Blincoe charts the artist's turn towards bigger, brasher, more joyous projects

Nicholas Blincoe
The Guardian,Saturday September 27 2008




Martin Creed and Tate Britain have developed an unlikely double act over the years. With its mass of architectural accessories - domes, pillars, porticos, steps and statuary - the gallery is, in the kindest possible sense, a fat drag queen of a building. Creed, in contrast, is resolutely slimline. Yet Tate Britain has provided the setting for three of his greatest triumphs. There was the night that Madonna presented him with the 2001 Turner prize, for a work that consisted of the lights going on and off in one of the gallery's rooms. Then there is Work No 850, staged throughout this summer, for which teams of runners have sprinted through the gallery's long central hall. But the key piece in this odd-couple relationship is the first: Work No 232 (1999), a garish neon sign spelling out the words "the whole world + the work = the whole world" across the building's façade. This slogan had previously been regarded as Creed's manifesto. Before its unveiling at Tate Britain, it had appeared on two other pieces, though in such low-key forms that it made far less of an impression. The new, neon version seemed to mock these small-scale versions. It was evident that Creed's work had taken a strange turn, towards a bigger and brasher personality.

The evolving ambition of Creed can be gauged at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, which is staging a career-long survey of his work. This is a first chance to see the blossoming of an extrovert; indeed, anyone willing to look at Creed's films - Sick, Shit and Sex (as self-explanatory titles as any that could be conceived) - will see far, far more than they would ever wish to. The difference from his earliest pieces is unmistakable. These were so modest as to be invisible.

In 1993, I visited two friends, Keiko Owada and Fiona Daly, and caught myself staring at a small paper cube built from layers of one-inch masking tape. When I asked what it was, Fiona handed me a piece of A4 paper with the typed instructions, Work No 74: As many 1 inch squares as are necessary cut from 1 inch masking tape and piled up, adhesive side down, to form a inch cubic stack. The paper was signed Martin Creed. Intrigued, I began visiting his shows. In those days, his best-known piece was a small bit of Blu-Tack - Work No 79: Some Blu-Tack kneaded, rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall (1993) - so all the fun was in failing to find the art. In a disused office block north of Oxford Street, I remember pausing to wonder why the door was jammed at an uncomfortable angle, and then toured a room that was empty of everything except the dust that infects old workspaces. Defeated, I turned to the catalogue and read: Work No 115: A doorstop fixed to a floor to let a door open only 45 degrees (1995).

Creed's works can be divided into two categories. Pieces in the first category - such as the doorstop, or the bell-shaped plaster bulge that first appeared as Work No 102: A protrusion from a wall and has periodically resurfaced in different dimensions or quantities, as in Work No 188: Two protrusions from a wall - come with specific instructions, invariably typed on to A4 paper. These instructions must be carried out if the work is to be exhibited or sold (or even performed: Creed created a band with Owada on bass and Daly on drums, and came to rehearsals with ready-typed instructions - play a scale, play a chord, start, stop, and so on). The instructions do not necessarily result in uniform pieces. For instance, Work No 100: On a tiled floor, in an awkward place, a cubic stack of tiles built on top of one of the existing tiles looks different in the Bern Kunsthalle than in a toilet cubicle in a disused office space. However, the end result flows smoothly from the original instruction and revolves around repetition and multiples. Perhaps this is why there could never be a work - Work No 2001, say - described as: Madonna handing the Turner prize to Martin Creed. It is an event that could never be repeated.

A second category of Creed's works revolve around general statements, the most well-known being "the whole world + the work = the whole world". This has been interpreted as a despairing comment on art's impact, but in the years before its appearance at Tate Britain it seemed more plausible that Creed was making a plea for economy in art. His work always involved everyday materials, whether Blu-Tack or A4 paper, seen also in Work No 140: A sheet of A4 paper torn upWork No 88: A sheet of A4 paper crumpled into a ball. In a Q&A session organised by the curator Matthew Higgs, Creed sounded self-deprecating as he described his work as "extra stuff in the world" and seemed at pains to cut down on waste. Then came the Tate Britain piece, with its gas and its glass and electricity. Gazing up at the brightly illuminated letters, it seemed that a low-key, zero-emission artist had been transformed. What exactly was the new Creed trying to say? and

A possible clue lies in the word "whole". At first glance, it appears redundant; after all, the world is the world. Perhaps he is claiming that this wholeness becomes apparent only with the arrival of his art, which is bold to the point of megalomania, in contrast to the modesty associated with his earlier works. Is it significant that the slogan is expressed as a sum - in effect, X + 0 = X? Clearly, Creed likes numbers: he numbers everything he does. The equation first appeared in 1996, typed on to A4 paper, and is a kind of companion piece to Work No 149: Half of anything multiplied by two. Both set up ideas of wholeness, division and the preservation or restoration of value, though given that Work No 149 is a piece of black paper, its actual value is ambiguous: one cannot say whether it is already whole or still awaiting restoration (though its dimensions - half the size of A4 - give some clue).

In fact, "the whole world + the work = the whole world" was always intended as both a joke and a zen-like paradox. While the majority of Creed's works depend on the performance of an instruction to be completed, this short typed statement on an A4 page was already complete. There was no further stage, the work was as whole or as lacking in wholeness as it was ever likely to be. However, once he emblazoned this statement across Tate Britain, the joke was lost. His equation took on the aspects of a grand belief system, as though he were lobbying to join the pantheon of superstars - Madonna, Tom Cruise, George Harrison - whose celebrity cannot be contained by established religion.

The latter half of the 1990s brought a decisive change in Creed's work. What was small became large. What had once been domestic now filled galleries. True, the piece Creed submitted for the Turner prize dated from his small-scale past, suggesting that he was still a dour minimalist. But by 2001, the new Creed had been around for several years. The key piece is Work No 200: Half the air in a given space. On the surface, it has all the attributes of his earliest work. It is mathematical. It sounds formal and repetitive. But what it is, in all its joyfulness, is a room filled with hundreds and hundreds of balloons. It was as though, after years of following orders, the artwork had finally discovered a loophole. Work No 200 turns art galleries into fun parks.

Another way of talking about the change in Creed's work is to say that he was once depressed, but he is no longer. The slogan "the whole world + the work = the whole world" is not economic, or philosophic, or even spiritual. It is psychological. After all, who really worries about the world, except those who cannot cope with it? Who worries about the inevitable uselessness of their actions, other than those slumped in inertia? Creed spent much of the 90s depressed. It is not a secret. If I had not already known it, the Q&A organised by Higgs would have provided proof, as it revealed the artist belittling his work and struggling to make the simplest decisions. Yet this in no way diminishes the work's quality. There is a more complex reason why the work cannot simply be reduced to biography: his melancholia somehow allowed objects the freedom to speak for themselves. If this sounds loopy, Creed believes it is true. Earlier this year, we took a walk and I recounted my serial failures to find his art. When I spoke about the doorstop, Creed nodded and told me this was a passive-aggressive piece. Not that he is passive-aggressive: only the doorstop.

Creed's earliest work gives instructions and then steps back. Freud said this is a symptom common to both depressives and the bereaved. Mourners retreat from the world because death has robbed the world of value. Melancholics feel only that the world has lost value; they are forced to create a fictional scenario that allows them to withdraw emotionally. As Creed staged his disappearance from the world, the work stepped forward to fill the vacuum. Doorstops were revealed as passive-aggressive; masking tape as obsessive-compulsive; A4 paper as tetchy, continuously issuing orders yet strangely submissive.

From the late 1990s, Creed has thrown himself back into the world, yet his talent for allowing the world to reveal itself has continued to bloom. Work No 200 - the balloons - is wonderful not only because the balloons are so frivolous (surely we knew this), but because the work lends personality to air. Who would have thought that air could be so pushy, given the opportunity to party? The running piece at Tate Britain uncovers the pathology of the least often noted objects in a gallery: the viewers. As they become obstacles to Creed's sprinters, the art lovers' self-effacement is revealed as a kind of narcissism. Even the extrovert new films aim only to give personality to the activities and products involved: the repetitiveness of sex, for instance, or the luminosity of sick. Creed has joked that, at least in his part of east London, vomit is as much an everyday material as the A4 paper of his early work.

The new, more joyous Creed continues to write music (though Daly has retired her drum kit, Owada remains Creed's bassist). Rather more bizarrely, he has taken to writing for classical music ensembles, up to and including orchestras. The invitation to Creed's exhibition at the Ikon Gallery includes a detour to the Symphony Hall to hear a piece that he has written specially for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Speaking before the September 23 performance, he was both nervous and excited. The work starts with a drum roll, a theatrical curtain-raiser, and then slows as it draws in each of the orchestra's voices in an even-handed score that places equal weight on each instrument. The problem was, Creed had no idea how this unusually democratic composition would sound. He had been playing the piece on keyboards, using orchestra software to approximate the instruments, but was awaiting the first rehearsal with the CBSO conductor, the highly regarded young Latvian Andris Nelsons. "If it sounds terrible, I'll have to change it," Creed said.

Creed's relationship with the Ikon Gallery began when he crafted an earlier musical piece for the museum: Work No 409, better known to its fans on YouTube as the "Singing Lift". Step inside the Ikon elevator and one's journey is accompanied by the voices of the Birmingham choir Ex Cathedra, rising as the lift rises and descending as it falls. Like his relationship with the Tate, the support of the Ikon Gallery has encouraged Creed to refine and amplify an ambition that has become ever more exuberant.

· In addition to the Birmingham exhibition, Martin Creed's Work No 850 continues at Tate Britain, London SW1, until November 16. Details: 020 7887 8888; tate.org.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/sep/27/art.martin.creed